119 entries from August 2011

08/31/2011

The statist, the believer in the magic powers of the state, is a totalitarian at heart. She wants one opinion, er, expert assessment, to govern us all.

The background attitude: nanny knows better than baby. Mind you, for nanny to have that advantage, she must be an expert. But what is an expert? An "expert" is what creates the magic difference between you, who doesn't know, and a higher force, who does know: the classic school yard star.

Our entire "educational" system is based on the idea of the ultimate know-it-all. A teacher friend of mine once warned me sternly against the internet, explaining that it provides no protection against false information. "Do teachers?" I replied, pointing out received wisdom in German school classes in the 1930s, going on to suggest that all human knowledge and information is fallible, and that the ability to discern information more likely to approximate truth from lesser candidates greatly increases with the internet, i.e. with the breadth of access to information.

Jonah Goldberg at the Los Angeles Times writes most sensibly:

There are no more devout members of the cult of expertise than mainstream journalists. They rely on experts for guidance about what is "mainstream" and accurate and what is not. Sometimes, that's fine. Surgeons are extremely reliable sources to explain how a heart attack happens. They're less reliable at telling you who will have one, save in a statistical sense, and even less reliable at telling you when a specific person will have one.

That's because prediction is hard. Experts — in politics, economics, climate — are very, very bad at telling people what will happen tomorrow, let alone next year or the next century. How many of the economists who tell us what to do now failed to see the mortgage debt crisis coming? Nearly all of them.

Philip Tetlock's 2005 book, "Expert Political Judgment," documents that the predictions of even the most credentialed and experienced experts are often worse and very rarely better than random guessing. "In this age of academic hyperspecialization," he writes, "there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals — distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on — are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in 'reading' emerging situations."

The cult of experts has acolytes in all ideological camps, but its most institutionalized following is on the left. The left needs to believe in the authority of experts because without that authority, almost no economic intervention can be justified. If you concede that you have no idea whether your remedy will work, it's going to be hard to sell it to the patient. Market-based ideologies don't have that problem because markets expect events in ways experts never can.

No president since Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt has been more enamored with the cult of expertise than Obama. That none of his economic predictions have panned out is not surprising. What is surprising is that so many people are surprised.

08/30/2011

ATLANTA (AP) — A presidential panel on Monday disclosed shocking new details of U.S. medical experiments done in Guatemala in the 1940s, including a decision to re-infect a dying woman in a syphilis study.

The Guatemala experiments are already considered one of the darker episodes of medical research in U.S. history, but panel members say the new information indicates that the researchers were unusually unethical, even when placed into the historical context of a different era.

Full Story.Imagine what they’ll do when they have the full blessing of the state.

"The arms industry did not create the war system. On the contrary, the war system created the arms industry.... All constitutions in the world vest the war-making power in the government or in the representatives of the people. The root of the trouble, therefore, goes far deeper than the arms industry. It lies in the prevailing temper of peoples toward nationalism, militarism, and war, in the civilization which forms this temper and prevents any drastic and radical change. Only when this underlying basis of the war system is altered, will war and its concomitant, the arms industry, pass out of existence."

The Ludwig von Mises Institute has re-released the book, from which the above quote stems: The Merchants of Death.

08/29/2011

If Paul wins, it won't be because he is the kind of candidate Americans have always gone for. It will be precisely because Americans have collectively decided on a dramatically new way of doing business -- a new political and economic paradigm -- and then he'll not only have ceased to be a long shot; he'll be the only shot.

(If Paul wins the nomination, I suspect the coverage will begin to take a much different tone.)

Critics have long contended that traffic light cameras don’t increase motorist safety so much as generate revenue for local and state governments. In 2008, for example, the Florida Public Health Review published a research paper that concluded the cameras “actually increase crashes and injuries, providing a safety argument not to install them.” In particular, there has been a dramatic increase in rear-end collisions, suggesting that people are slamming on their brakes to avoid a ticket.

In the meantime, in a decision that is overwhelmingly the result of the hard work and dedication of one person, Los Angeles is ending its revenue-generating red-light camera scheme. Watch the man, who made it happen:

Looks like this is from the Houston Chronicle, which I believe counts as a legitimate source.

Disclaimer: this is the type of thing that a responsible journalist would hold until verifying its authenticity. Me, I'm a blogger. I have no idea if this is real, but it's starting to fly around the internet.

If it is real, this was written after he was elected, and certainly after he decided he was a Republican and not a Democrat. Anybody who thinks he switched parties because he had some philosophical epiphany has a screw loose - he switched because there was a spot in the GOP that got him elected to office.

Of course, I fully expect him to say that he's a changed man, and we're all sinners, blah blah blah, but I'm not buying the Gantry-inspired inevitable humble request for forgiveness. What I'll never understand is why so many people will when there are several good candidates who didn't write anything like this, ever.

Hans Bader at CEI's OpenMarket blog has an excellent article on the belief that insufficient government spending caused the Great Depression and stands in the way of economic recovery today:

The federal budget deficit is already around $1.6 trillion, meaning that the government is borrowing more than 40 cents of every dollar it spends. But The New York Times’ editorial board and some Obama administration officials want to run up even bigger deficits to pay for liberal programs, supposedly to “stimulate” the economy. (Never mind that the $800 billion stimulus package failed, and even wiped out some jobs, such as in America’s export sector.)